Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday May 17, 2013 @09:58AM
from the even-foxes-like-cookies dept.

hypnosec writes "Mozilla is not going ahead with its plans to block third-party cookies by default in the Beta version of its upcoming Firefox 22. Mozilla needs more time to analyze the outcome of blocking these cookies. The non-profit organization released Firefox Aurora on April 5 with a patch by Jonathan Mayer built into it which would only allow cookies from those websites which the user has visited. The patch would block the ones from sites which hadn't been visited yet. The reason for Mozilla's change in plans is that they're currently looking into 'false positives.' If a user visits one part of a group of site, cookies from that part will be allowed, but cookies from related sites in the group may be blocked, and they're worried it will create a poor user experience. On the other side of the coin, there are 'false negatives.' Just because a user may have visited a particular site doesn't mean she is comfortable with the idea of being tracked."

Blocking third party cookies will not break cross site logins like Google have implemented between google.com and YouTube, as they use the redirect method. Sign into google and watch the address bar. they redirect to YouTube passing a one-time sign-in code in the query string. It has nothing to do with 3rd party cookies as the only cookies you get are from the sites in your address bar.

The only thing 3rd party cookies are useful for is tracking you. Anyone who says otherwise makes their living out of stripping you of your privacy.

I block third party cookies. What happens when I land on a page that uses Disqus? I have to coax the browser to log me in to Disqus. And - that is just the way I want things to be. Disqus doesn't need to know where I browse, or what I'm reading, unless and until I CHOOSE to summon Disqus.

Children, if you're going to dabble in the arcane arts, you must learn to control those demons - or you will find that the demons control YOU!

The only thing 3rd party cookies are useful for is tracking you. Anyone who says otherwise makes their living out of stripping you of your privacy.

Reading fail! The summary itself says the policy is being delayed because of false positives, ie, things that they are blocking that is causing users to complain.

This is exactly what happened with Safari. Somebody decides that "privacy" can be viewed exclusively through the lens of particular technologies, that advertising is bad and they will "save the users" fr

that would be pretty great, if it isolated the cookies so that you would have different login for youtube..and different login for google.com from gmail. it would be sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet. because google is shit poor guessing which account I want to use, if I want finnish localization or not and so forth.

Sometimes those sites might access an API by talking to a single shared API endpoint for the group, which might then not work well at all. It's possible to make it work (with proxies, or by not using cookies at the cost of making your site annoyingly forgetful for a user, or by using some JS to fetch the cookie value over the API and store it as a first-party cookie then pass it to each API call as a parameter), but there must be existing sites that weren't written with this in mind. They'll probably be bro

I have third-party cookies (indeed, all cookies, except those from domains specifically whitelisted) blocked. I've never noticed a problem with blocking third-party cookies. I have a heck of a lot more issues with third-party JavaScript (people using Google-hosted or similar JQuery for example).

So, Firefox, take note, there are not going to be any problems for the vast majority of people.

I have third-party cookies (indeed, all cookies, except those from domains specifically whitelisted) blocked. I've never noticed a problem with blocking third-party cookies. I have a heck of a lot more issues with third-party JavaScript (people using Google-hosted or similar JQuery for example).

So, Firefox, take note, there are not going to be any problems for the vast majority of people.

I find it laughable that one of Mozilla's excuses for not doing this is "they're worried it will create a poor user experience". Over the last few years Mozilla has made a number of changes to Firefox that were met with user complaints, and continue to be a source of user complaints and the developer's response is always a resounding "fuck you".

As far as cookies go, don't forget that Mozilla currently gets $300 Million a year from Google, whose entire gazillion-dollar-a-year business model is based on tracking people.

No, it hasn't been blocking third party cookies for years. This is the core of why such policies are a bad idea. It says it blocks third party cookies, but there are actually lots of exceptions [webkit.org] to that rule in order to avoid as the summary says "false positives". You can read about what really happened with Google on Lauren Weinstein's blog [vortex.com], it's very different to how you paint it (there was no "trying to circumvent" involved).

The worst kind of 3rd party javascript is the stuff from *.cloudfront.net, where * appears able to be any random string. It (and amazon web services) are the bane of trying to keep a neat whitelist of domains for NoScript.

The only thing I notice is I can't comment on Disqus (a 3rd party site that handles comments on some blogs). I don't care about it, block them.

Firefox should focus on privacy, its their usp. Google for example, doesn't let you accept cookies for the 'session only', you accept them or not on their Android browser. At some point you have to accept cookies, so this is a fake choice, you'll end up with that feature always on because its too much fuss to turn it on when its needed.

Firefox 'accept cookies for session only' option is my default, it lets me work on sites that use cookies, but throws them away when I close the browser.

a "session cookie" is literally a different type of cookie as sent from the server.aka "transient cookies"they are typically to follow you around that "session" on the website. not the session in the browser.but yes, the browsers happen to trash them when you exit. but if you run out of cookie memory, they'll page them out or scrap the old ones entirely.

The problem Mozilla finds itself in now is that since a large number of people use it, it's harder to make such changes. You might think this is a no brainer, but people who use Disqus or other services which are built around third party cookies, of which there are many, might disagree with their page or sites they visit breaking and either not knowing the cause, or not being knowledgeable enough to fix it.

This wasn't such a problem when using Firefox was more of a techie thing. Now they need to tread light

The easy way out of that is to include a default white list. Which of course should be open and configurable (add/remove sites from whitelist; disable whitelist completely).

I have been blocking third-party cookies since I found out Mozilla (yes, back then) allowed me to do so. And when switching to Firefox when it became useful I did the same. Never had any problems with it.

It was all information then. Nowadays it's a lot bulkier but 98% of it is crap. There may be as much useful information on it but it's a lot harder to find it when every search brings up millions of pages of bullshit. And the 'improvements' in the search engines have been quite negative on balance as well.

Agreed. Allowing 3rd party cookies is just a security bug. It is just like all other cross-site attacks: sensitive data can be leaked to sites that the user did NOT want to visit or leak his info to. Thank goodness there are extensions to work around this bug.

Don't worry, we still track people who don't clear history through the use of 1x1 pixel images, display:none anchors, and javascript checking the visited property, and server side analysis of whether or not your browser has cached dynamically generated names.

A bit of jquery doing some XHR & a binary search on:visited goes a long way to getting and setting unique id's.

How is Disqus supposed to fix the problem? The entire selling point of Disqus is that it's a single-login discussion system that can be added to any website without any need for server support. Just add the Javascript to the page and bingo, you have a discussion system.

Without "third party cookies", Disqus has no way to provide anything resembling a single login or respect for your own preferences. About the nearest thing I can think of is that it could pop-up a new window whenever you want to respond to

I'm sure that I'm naive, but can't they just run a little script that detects the cookie, and if not found asks the user to click a link to enable comments? Then the user would have visited the site (Disqus) and the Firefox block would be removed forever forward.

1. Explain how having to reload the page (Jump to Disqus and then bounce back) going to be positive for the user's experience. I certainly don't see how it would be remotely positive.

2. How is this going to work without the host installing something on their server? As I said, a selling point of Disqus is that it doesn't need anything on the hosts' server at all, just some boiler plate HTML that inserts the Disqus Javascript script.

1. Explain how having to reload the page (Jump to Disqus and then bounce back) going to be positive for the user's experience. I certainly don't see how it would be remotely positive.

2. How is this going to work without the host installing something on their server? As I said, a selling point of Disqus is that it doesn't need anything on the hosts' server at all, just some boiler plate HTML that inserts the Disqus Javascript script.

I don't see your solution as being "How they should have done it all along". It's inefficient, kludgy, and fails the ease-of-installation test.

the solution can entirely be javascript included in the page source, mostly as it is. the only thing that would break with breaking of cross site cookies/storage would be that you wouldn't be already logged in when you go to another disqus enabled site.

though, admittedly, I viewed it as a bonus that the login is intrusive and the user has to visit the site of the service he's authenticating to. think of it as one-click-sign-on instead of already logged in when you go to a new site single-sign-on.. the page

As far as I know, this problem is not intrinsic to the design of OpenID itself. It is designed to use redirections to basically pass data back and forth between the OpenID provider and the web site. I don't think other OpenID implementations have this problem. I don't know enough details about OpenID to describe exactly how, but I think the answer comes down to "follow the specification" and "do what other sites do."

Disqus is only an example but the point is that there are "third party web components" that will be effected by a platform wide block. For cases like this it is good to give legitimate component software a "transitional grace period" to move away from the deprecated behavior before locking it out from modern versions onward.

I view control over "third party sources" in web content as a serious security issue but I also admit that I don't know the full ramifications of an outright ban either where taking the

Now that your delaying third party cookies hows about using the extra time to add support for new versions of TLS? Why is IE the only browser supporting TLS v1.1 and 1.2? Even chrome supports 1.1 and it uses NSS too.

We are still dealing with a few lazy nessus wielding compliance jackasses invoking BEAST to get EVERYONE to use broken RC4 ciphers because a few users still have not updated their browsers to fix a known problem solved over a decade ago.

I've been in digital advertising for over 14 years, and have always been involved in tracking / targeting of ads. I don't bother to block cookies, simply because I honestly don't see much privacy infringement. At the back end of our tracking systems I just see a bunch of numbers. I've never once seen a name and honestly I have no desire to target or track an individual... there's no money in such a tight target group, but we purposely don't try in any case.

Long before Firefox existed, IE6 allowed blocking 3rd party cookies.However, it would display an icon on the status-bar and when I clicked on it, it would show me a list of blocked items and allow me to white-list them.

I've been blocking third-party cookies for years with absolutely no hint of any site failing to load correctly. If there is ever a problem, it is scripting, and choosing to disable NoScript on one or more sites typically sorts that out. Get the advertising industry's dick out of your ass and just fucking block third-party cookies already, Mozilla. It should have been done a hell of a long time ago. This new versioning system can be so amazingly retarded; we're at Firefox 21 already, already talking about Firefox 22, and Mozilla is still dragging their feet around on something as simple as the default fucking setting of a checkbox regarding third-party cookies. Talk about illusion of progress! You know that by this point, Mozilla no longer gives a shit about their actual users and seems to have their priorities in the advertisers; otherwise there would be no question, no delay. Why hasn't there been a fork of Firefox yet? IMO, it's been needing one free of Mozilla's bullshit since the 2.x.x days at the very least, or possible 3.x. This is getting ridiculous.

Cookies used to be really easy to deal with using mozilla, it wrote them all to cookies.txt. You just went in, deleted cookies.txt once, then mkdir cookies.txt. Then set it to allow cookies across the board. All websites worked fine, but anytime you restarted the browser they were all gone. Not 100% ideal but still a quick and relatively foolproof way to assert some sanity. So of course they changed that.

Now... let me get this straight, they are thinking about maybe, eventually, blocking third party cookies by default. Better late than never I guess, but it seems pathetic both in timing and scope as well, since they appear to be worried only about cookies(!) rather than scripting. Third party scripts are a much bigger problem. Both cases should have been blocked by default 10 years or more ago. At this point, yes, I would imagine some problems.

I see in Eich's comment where he talks about a site "foo.com" including content from a separate domain "foocdn.com" belonging to the same company. My question is why they're using a separate domain? Why not "cdn.foo.com" which would automatically indicate that this domain's part of "foo.com". Or is this a case of "Doc, I don't want to stop hitting myself in the head with a hammer. I just want you to make it stop hurting."?

Because the cdn is probably (hosted at) a different company; not hosted on your own server (that has the database and provides all dynamic content and user logins and whatnot - keeping all that important information in house), but that seriously bandwidth-eating stuff comes from say Amazon or some cloud server.

Now why such foocdn would need cookies, that'd be the real question. That's supposed to be static content, downloaded via direct links in the main html.

And? I delegate cdn.foo.com to the CDN company and let them assign names as they see fit. It's not magic, how do you think the root nameservers delegated foo.com to Foo's nameservers in the first place? C'mon, this is DNS 101, the stuff you were supposed to know before you got your first domain.